I’ve been thinking a lot of late about what to say the next time I go to Washington. I seem to get there, one way or another, about twice a year these days. I don’t do it to sight-see, though Washington D.C. is “home to a rich and varied set […]
The continuum. It’s not an “organization of intergalactic intelligent designers whose purpose seems to be constant irritation of Jean-Luc Picard”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28Star_Trek%29. The continuum is the ultimate expression of quantum mechanics. It is what nature does with energy when it converts to mass: generate a continuous distribution of random particles whose production […]
I just got off the phone with Jodi, and she said it’s snowing in Minnesota. I WANT SNOW!!! Right now, this is the best I can manage:
Timely. NPR’s program “Soundprint today explored the story of ancient footprints uncovered in Africa, and how evolution is both denied and manipulated by politicians and theologians in South Africa to achieve their personal agendas”:http://soundprint.org/radio/display_show/ID/37/name/Footprints. This is an excellent illustration of just what happens when you couple the base states of […]
As I commented the last night, who could expect the Pope to do anything but come out in favor of Catholic doctrine? To better illustrate the fundamentalism, however, that he seems to have embraced, let’s contrast Cardinal Poupard’s measured reason with the Pope’s pop: Cardinal Poupard “But we also know […]
Bob Park “hits them all again in his column”:http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN05/wn111105.html, “What’s New?”. As my father first brought to my attention, then as I saw in the news and now read in Bob’s column, Pat Robertson verbally intervened after the ousting of the Dover, PA schoolboard. After the voters in Dover taught […]
The new Kansas state board of education’s science standards state that “Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.” More adequate explanations? What does that mean? “Logical argument” is […]
Academic freedom is at the very core of all that I do. I have a great liberty in science, the liberty of thought. But the popular image of a physicist, that of Einstein in his old age, is quite misleading. Most of the physicists that I know do not spend […]
Now that we’re off daylight savings time, I leave work only to be greeting by a world cloaked, a thin veil of bright sky clinging to the ridgeline of the Santa Cruz mountains. Tonight, however, was just a little bit different. While we’ve been enjoying some cool, cloudly days this […]
The “New York Times has a nice piece summarizing the ousting of 8/9 of the Dover Schoolboard yesterday”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09dover.html?ex=1289192400&en=0afa2b7119328aa5&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss. Sounds like some of the new members really intend to do away with this very dangerous decision by their predecessors to inject non-science into the science classroom.
“Looks like the school board that injected non-science into the science classrom (and got sued for it) got voted out”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051109/ap_on_re_us/evolution_showdown;_ylt=AkRm9TAX5JLbX0M0NYjbefus0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MzV0MTdmBHNlYwM3NTM-. I just learned that these elections were happening earlier today. Whether voters ousted them for their ideological zealotry, or their waste of money in encouraging this lawsuit, it seems that […]
What exactly are students in Kansas’ public schools to be taught about science? That was the question on my mind as I drove home tonight. I finished my dinner and sat down at my laptop, eager to pull up the science standards from Kansas to see if science was everywhere […]